The New York Times hasn’t shied away from publishing Marxist boosterism.

In 2017, the Times dedicated an entire section of its website to the 100-year anniversary of the communist revolution in Russia. It featured an assortment of absurd pieces running the gamut of declaring Lenin a hero environmentalist to claiming that women had better sex lives under socialism.

Of course, while the most ridiculous claim in the most recent piece is that Marx has somehow proven to be correct, it’s notable it goes a step further to say that essentially nobody questions his fundamental critiques of capitalism.

“While most are in agreement about Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism, opinion on how to treat its ‘disorder’ is thoroughly divided,” Barker wrote.

It seems fair to conclude that actually there is widespread doubt about Marx’s claims about capitalism—unless, of course, one lives in a neatly sealed left-wing bubble.

The fact is, Marx was wrong about everything.

He was wrong about economics, wrong about the flow of history, wrong about religion, wrong about where his ideas would lead, and most importantly, wrong about human nature—which he believed could be reshaped under a communist regime.

If there was one thing that was illuminating about Barker’s piece, it was his description of modern social justice crusades as fundamentally Marxist.

“Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the ‘eternal truths’ of our age,” Barker wrote. “Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.”

Today’s Western socialists, dreaming of a world where private property and inequality are outlawed, where rational economic development is planned by far-seeing intellectuals, should be careful what they wish for … they may just get it.

Communism offers nothing to humanity but suffering and hopelessness.

This is not to say that life under communism was all about starvation and murderous purges.

Even at its least malignant, living under communism’s inevitable system of enforced conformity and equality where decisions are only the purview of government authorities and bureaucratic managers is hardly a system of human flourishing.

This is more akin to living a lifetime stuck in the DMV. Marx was wrong, hopelessly wrong. His ideas have been tried, tested, and spectacularly failed. It’s time to leave his legacy on the ash heap of history.

In order to know why Marxism fails in the “applied” department, it’s important to know that Marx basically took Plato’s Republic and re-wrote it to use buzzwords like class warfare, revolution, and historical struggle. All he really did was re-label the Philosopher King as a mysterious substance called the Proletariat. All the other ingredients of Plato are in place: he owns all knowledge, all money, all property, and all must bow to Him and His Group – who all have a SINGLE intelligence – (not much known about the human brain in 3500 BC). Plato’s students, using his version of historicism (which theoretically exists INDEPENDENTLY of human minds – another thing they did not know could not exists, in 3500 BC) went on to become famous tyrants across southern Europe. It formed the model of the European city state.

The funny thing is that Marx did not care about justice at all in his so-called correct critique of capitalism: he only believed in REVOLUTION.

Karl Adler – the “vulgar Marxist” – in the late 1800s-early 1900s drove activism for social causes in central Europe to “drive” what I’d call mini-revolutions. It was THIS form of “Marxism” that overtook the American academy in Jim-Crow America of anti-minority racism. It is this form of it that riddles the America of today to the point of political-correctness absurdity.